To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One

by Robert Silverberg

  In some ways, that’s very much what happened, since my debut as a professional writer coincided with my transition from awkward, uncertain adolescent to poised and confident adult. But it didn’t happen overnight and there were a few ironic complications along the way. For one thing, my first sale (barring a couple of semiprofessional things) was a novel that was to be published in hard covers, which to me meant that it would be far less visible and impressive to my friends in fandom than, say, a short story printed in the awesomely prestigious magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which everybody read. So that book sale, significant though it was to my career, failed to transform my self-image in the way I had hoped. And then I did sell a story to one of the professional science-fiction magazines—in January, 1954, while I was still finishing a very ambitious novelette that I called “Road to Nightfall.” The story had the title of “Gorgon Planet,” and I had written it in September, 1953 for the first s-f editor I had come to know personally: Harry Harrison, who had just taken over the editorship of three magazines. That summer Harrison had asked me to write a short article explaining s-f fandom for one of his magazines—my first real professional sale, though because it was nonfiction it didn’t really count in my eyes. A few weeks later I brought him “Gorgon Planet,” which he said wasn’t quite good enough for his top-of-the-line magazine, Science Fiction Adventures, but which he was willing to publish in one of its lesser companions, Rocket Stories or Space Science Fiction. So I had sold a story at last! (But I hadn’t exactly sold it yet, merely had had it accepted, because Rocket and Space paid only on publication).

  Since Harry would buy only North American rights, I was free to submit my story overseas—and immediately did, to Nebula Science Fiction, a pleasant, somewhat old-fashioned magazine that had begun operations in Scotland the year before. Reasoning correctly that Nebula’s youthful editor, Peter Hamilton, might be having difficulties getting stories from the better-known writers, I had begun sending him mine as soon as I learned of his magazine’s existence. He replied with rejection letters containing friendly encouragement: “If you like to go on trying,” he told me in July of 1953, “I’ll be only too happy to continue to advise you. If you become a big name through Nebula it will be as big a thing for me (nearly) as it will be for you.” And on January 11, 1954, he wrote to me to say, “You will be pleased to hear that I have accepted ‘Gorgon Planet,’ and it will appear in the 7th issue of Nebula (due out early February).” Through Hamilton’s American agent I duly received my payment—$12.60—and, a few weeks later, a copy of the published story itself.

  So, this time, I really had sold a story to one of the magazines! But where was my instant fame, where was my sudden prestige? Nowhere, as a matter of fact, because Nebula was virtually unknown in the United States and gained me no awe whatever from my friends in fandom. I would have to wait until the story appeared in Rocket Stories or Space Science Fiction for that.

  But Rocket and Space went out of business almost at once, neither publishing my story nor paying me for it. To Peter Hamilton of Nebula went the glory, such as it was, of bringing Robert Silverberg’s first professionally-published science fiction story into print. And here it is—mainly for the historical record, I suppose. (I finally did sell it to an American magazine, by the way—in 1958, to a short-lived item called Super-Science Fiction. The editor retitled it “The Fight with the Gorgon,” which didn’t strike me as an improvement, but I kept my mouth shut and cashed my check.) The story’s not terrible, actually. It’s something less than a masterpiece, I suppose; but, glancing through it now, I can see that even at the age of eighteen I had mastered the fundamentals of storytelling as it was practiced in the science-fiction magazines of the day. Despondent as I often was in those days as story after story came back rejected, I was obviously on the brink of a writing career. All that was missing was an editor willing to say yes, and finally I had found one. Peter Hamilton published seven more stories of mine in the remaining five years of his magazine’s life, and he always seemed as delighted to have discovered me as I had been to be discovered by him.

  ——————

  Our troubles started the moment the stiffened corpse of Flaherty was found, standing frozen in a field half a kilometer from the ship. We had all hated the big Irishman’s guts, but finding his body, completely unharmed, stock-still and standing alone, was quite a jolt. There was no apparent sign of death—in fact, at first we thought he was sleeping on his feet. Horses do it, and Flaherty wasn’t far removed from a horse.

  But he wasn’t. He was dead, dead as hell. And when the entire human population of a planet consists of eight, and one of those eight dies suddenly of unknown causes, the framework of your existence tends to sag a bit. We were scared.

  “We” being the first Earth Exploratory Party (Type A-7) to Bellatrix IV in Orion. Eight men, altogether, bringing back a full report on the whole planet. Eight, of whom one, ox-like Flaherty, was stiff as a board before us.

  “What did it, Joel?” asked Tavy Upton, our geologist.

  “How the blazes do I know?” I snapped. I regretted losing my temper instantly. “Sorry, Tavy. But I know as much as you do about the whole thing. Flaherty is dead, and there’s something out there that killed him.”

  “But there’s nothing out there,” protested Kai Framer, the biologist. “For three days we’ve hunted up and down and haven’t found a sign of animal life.”

  Jonathan Morro, biologist, unwound his six-feet-eight and stretched. “Maybe an intelligent plant did him in, eh, Kaftan?”

  I shook my head. “Doubt it, Jon. No sign of violence, no plants in the vicinity. We found him standing in the middle of a field, on his two big feet, frozen dead. Doesn’t figure.”

  Over in the corner of the cabin, Steeger—medical officer—was puttering around the corpse. Steeger was an older man than most of us, one who had literally rotted in the service. He had contracted frogpox on Fomalhaut II, and now wore two chrome-jacketed titanium legs. I looked over at him.

  “Any report, Doc?”

  Steeger turned watery eyes towards me. “No sign of any physical harm, Joel. But his muscles are all tensed, as if—as if—well, I can’t phrase it. He seems to have been frozen in his tracks by some strange force. I’m stuck, Joel.”

  Phil Janus, our chronicler, looked up from the chess game he’d been playing with pilot Gar Holden and laughed. “Maybe he had an overdose of his own joy-juice and it hardened all his arteries.”

  That was a reference to the crude still Flaherty had rigged the day we landed on Bellatrix IV. His duties as navigator had kept the big fellow pretty busy all trip, but first day down-planet and he spent his first idle hour building the still. He didn’t say a word about it to anyone, but had shown up at mess that night pretty high. He never told us where the still was, though we searched all over. The second day Janus had located a liter flask of whisky, home-brewed, and his sampling had cost him a black eye.

  “No,” said Framer. “Let’s be serious a moment. One of our group is dead, and we don’t know what killed him. There’s something out there that Flaherty crossed. I move we organize a searching party to find out what.”

  “Seconded,” murmured Morro.

  I looked at the corpse for a moment, then at the six men around me. Framer was my solid man, I knew, the leader of the group. Morro was strong, too, but usually too bored to bother with the welfare of the group. Young Holden, the pilot, was a follower; he didn’t have any thoughts of his own, or at least he didn’t express any. Tavy Upton I knew: quiet, smiling, unassuming—not very strong a person. Doc Steeger was small, frightened, not at all the sort of man who’d go gallivanting around space as part of an exploratory crew. Janus was like Morro in many ways: he just didn’t care. Flaherty, thank the Lord, was dead. The big ox had threatened nasty incidents many times, and had been a constant source of dissension on-ship.

  As for me—Joel Kaftan, Lieut. (Spatial)—I was scared. Plenty scared. Visible monsters on a planet are bad en
ough; invisible ones were hell. I looked out at the port and saw the vast, empty, tree-studded plain that was our chunk of Bellatrix IV, and looked back at the men.

  “All in favor of a searching party, say aye.”

  Aye it was, and we divided up. There were seven of us, now, and that made things awkward. Steeger was indispensable, as our doctor, and he was of no use outdoors anyway. Holden was theoretically dispensable—in a pinch I could probably have piloted the ship—but I would have hated to try, and so I confined him to quarters too. That left just five men for the search.

  It was logical to split into two groups, one of three men and one of two. But I didn’t think too clearly for a moment, and announced we’d have three groups. I didn’t figure that one poor chap would have to go out alone.

  I teamed up with Upton, and Framer with Morro. That left Janus as a searching party of one. I kick myself every time I remember it: what a hare-brained idea to let one man roam alone!

  Janus didn’t mind. Phil rarely minded anything. “Looks like I’m lone wolf,” he said. “Okay, gentlemen. If you hear a loud silence from my neck of the woods, run like hell.”

  The airlock was open anyway (Bellatrix IV has an atmosphere roughly that of Earth’s, which was a boon) and the five of us left.

  I started out with Tavy and we headed towards the site of Flaherty’s finish, very much scared. When your lifespan is 150 or so years, and you’ve got a hundred of them left, you’re not too anxious to die young, even as a hero on an alien planet. Framer and Morro wandered up towards the big ridge behind the spaceship, and Janus headed for the clump of twisted red-leaved trees about two hundred meters away.

  Tavy and I moved slowly, casting our eyes in all directions. As usual, there was no sign of any animal life. Bellatrix IV had an abundance of plants (not chlorophyll-based plants, but ones with some sort of iron-compound base), a temperate climate, flowing streams of real H2O water. But no visible animals. Of course, we hadn’t covered much territory yet, maybe two or three square kilometers.

  No one dared to make a sound. Then suddenly, in about two seconds flat, we got our first taste of Bellatrician life. Poor Janus came flying out of his copse, and lumbering behind him out of nowhere came a bizarre thing about ten feet high with non-functional wings, gleaming golden scales, and a headful of writhing, pencil-like tentacles.

  We stood transfixed. This great beast had appeared from nowhere and was about to finish off Janus. I drew my rifle and put a shot into the scales, without any seeming effect. And then Janus turned and stared up at the beast for a fraction of a second.

  The beast stared too, and the frantic pursuit came to an end. They glared at each other for just a moment, and then the monster wheeled and ran off in the other direction. It disappeared over the hill.

  But Janus remained where he was, frozen dead.

  We planted our second corpse and sat morosely in the cabin. We missed Flaherty just a bit, but not too much. But Janus, though, genial, clever, enormously capable—it was hard to believe he was dead, killed by the glance of a gorgon.

  For the beast of the forest was unquestionably a gorgon. Doc Steeger had given us the first inkling when he pointed out that death had been caused by a sudden neural blast.

  Framer looked up at this. “We didn’t see any physical contact between Phil and the monster, though.”

  “No,” broke in Upton. “Janus just looked at the thing, and then he froze stiff—”

  The thought came to Morro and myself almost instantaneously.

  “A gorgon,” I said.

  “Gorgon,” he echoed. He stood up—preposterously lanky fellow—and stared outside at the wide plain with its deadly clump of trees at one corner. “A gorgon.”

  “Pardon me, sir.” It was Holden. “Just exactly what is a gorgon, sir? They said nothing about them in the Academy.”

  Framer muttered something under his breath. Kal, I knew, was a man of wide learning, and he had nothing but scorn for modern educational methods, which are highly specialized. Morro spoke.

  “A gorgon, Gar, is a mythological beast. It kills by a glance; if you look at its eyes, you are turned to stone. This thing outside is virtually a living representation of a gorgon, complete to those tentacles on its head. The original gorgon was supposed to have living snakes instead of hair.”

  Holden said nothing, but his eyes widened.

  Upton scratched his long nose with a thick finger. “Joel, how are we going to combat friend gorgon outside?”

  “The same way Perseus did,” I said.

  And so Operation Medusa got under way. It took some preliminary discussion. For one thing, Holden, who held most of our technological information behind his freckled forehead, had not the slightest knowledge of the Perseus myth, and we had to bring him up to date.

  Morro, the patient giant, did most of the explaining.

  “Perseus, a Greek hero, boasted he could kill Medusa, the gorgon. With the help of the gods he got a pair of magic sandals which enabled him to fly, and a cap of invisibility. Then, he polished his shield to mirror brightness and swooped down on the gorgon, watching her in his mirror-shield, and without ever looking her in the face he cut off her head.”

  “I see,” Gar said. “We have to hunt this gorgon too, and we can’t look at it either, or—” He nodded outside at the two brown mounds of earth.

  “Right,” Framer said. “But we don’t have a mirror. And we can’t build one. What now?”

  “Try radar,” Upton offered.

  “That’s it!” I whooped. “Hunt down the gorgon with radar and blast it without ever looking at the blasted thing!”

  From there on Medusa’s number was up. But she didn’t go down without a fight.

  Holden had the radar screen dismantled and set up for gorgon hunting in no time at all. The boy’s horizons were limited, but in the fields for which he had been educated he was tops. On a warm, summery day, we set out on our gorgon-hunt.

  We always had difficulty adjusting to the red leaves on the trees and especially the carpet of red grass on the ground. Bellatrix IV, as far as we could see, was a huge plain, covered with what seemed to be a bloody carpet. Every time I looked down I felt a twinge, and thought of the two graves near the ship, and of the two explorers who would never get back for another lecture tour on Earth.

  Steeger remained behind on ship, peering intently into the radar screen. The five of us fanned out slowly, armed to the teeth and scared stiff. I could see myself that evening, being borne back to the ship, frozen, and sharing that impromptu graveyard with Janus and Flaherty.

  Steeger had more to worry about than any of us. Hunched over the radar screen he was; his job was to relay instructions to us. We knew the gorgon was somewhere in the copse, because Framer had seen the great thing go thundering into the clump of trees the day before, and no one had seen or heard it since. But only a fool would go in there after a beast that killed by a glance.

  Slowly, painfully, the five of us formed a wide circle around the copse, standing no closer than a hundred meters from the edge. Not one of us dared to look up, of course; our eyes remained fixed on the blood-red grass and Steeger directed us to our positions, step by painful step. It took half an hour to form the circle, as Doc would tell first one, then another of us, to move a couple of steps to right or left. Finally the circle was complete—five Perseuses, frightened green.

  Then came the rough part, as we waited for the attack. When the call came over the phones from Steeger, I was going to hurl a Johnston flare into the copse, and, if all went as planned, the gorgon would come lumbering out. Without looking, we would fire.

  As I look back, I see it was a pretty hare-brained scheme. So many things could have gone wrong that it’s a wonder we ever allowed it to go into operation.

  Doc gave the signal, and I drew back my arm and flung the flare, automatically looking up as I did. For one horror-stricken second I feared the gorgon might approach just as I looked up, but there was no sign of it.

&nb
sp; Then all hell broke loose in the copse.

  A Johnston flare goes off like a lithium bomb—at least it creates enough light to simulate one. That copse lit up bright yellow, and I caught the odd contrast between the red of the leaves and the yellow of the light. And I saw something huge thrashing around in the heart of the copse before I jerked my head down. I stared at my feet.

  Try blindfolding yourself some time and walking down a city street, an empty street at dawn. The terror is something almost unimaginable, the unreasoning terror of the blind. That’s the way I felt, knowing that at any moment a monster might burst out of the clump of trees and leap at me while I stood studying my boots. An awful ten seconds passed, and seemed like days, and I grew progressively more numb with fear, until I passed the point of fright and seemed almost calm. Nothing happened, though the flare continued to kick up a powerful light. I heard rustling noises in the copse.

  And then all at once I heard Steeger’s tinny yell in my phones.

  “Joel!”

  In the same instant I drew with my right hand and flung my left hand behind my neck, forcing my head down. I aimed the blaster up at a 45-degree angle and began sizzling away for all I was worth. Over to my left I could hear Morro doing the same.

  There was the sound of thunder, as of a great beast lumbering around near me. I could hear Steeger screaming something in my phones, but I was unable to stop yelling myself. And I didn’t dare look up.